Monday, April 23, 2012

Make Believe Monday: What would humanity be like without...

....Emotions?

Make Believe Monday is a meme, where you get to play "Make Believe" on a
Monday. It tends to have a theme, but I don't mind if you do your own thing. You
can choose to take part or not take part, but if you do take part, pretty please
put a link to my post in your post and leave a link to your post in a comment on
my post. Thanks and have fun playing make believe...

Oh, And
it's not always bookish.

Today the concept is: What would humanity be like without...
Basically the idea is you get to pick something, some sort of trait that humans have and imagine our society without it. What would be the pros and cons of this?

I chose emotions, because I have a lot of those. I was also inspired by a male friend who told me that he has no emotions (I think this was a typical Boys-don't-cry defense mechanism, to get out of talking about gushy things. And a lie) and that anyone can turn their emotions off, they just don't know how (Also convinced this is a lie). It got me thinking what if we could turn our emotions off when we didn't want or need them?

Emotions are both good and bad things. Sometimes feeling is good. Being happy, laughing, feeling loved... are all positive emotions. There are also negative ones like jealousy, sadness, fear and anger that I know we all wouldn't mind doing away with. We do need some balance though.. If we could go through our emotions like a catalogue and deselect what we don't want to feel, then we would probably delete the negative ones. Without negative emotions to bring us down to earth, we might get a bit flighty. We might get some crazy ideas in our heads about things that are impossible. Negative emotions aren't as bad as we think they are. Some of the best pieces of writing, art and music were inspired by negative emotion.

Obviously you couldn't just get rid of emotions altogether. You'd miss out on things like adrenaline and joy. Life would be very boring and everyone would be very success obsessed. We'd never date anyone we actually liked, because we wouldn't know whether or not we actually liked them. We'd be honest with ourselves without feeling sad about it and we'd be honest with other people without worrying about what they would say to us. The world would pretty much be 'The Invention of Lying', minus feelings.

So, what if we could turn off our emotions? Would we have them "on" all the time and just turn them off for certain moments, like say job interviews and encounters with nasty people? Or, would we turn them "off" during the majority of time and just turn them back on for special occasions like hanging out with friends, dating and watching rom-coms? If we did the latter, I think we'd go a bit mental when we turned them back on. We'd have all these emotions bottled up, wanting to get out and we'd make complete fools of ourselves. There would have to be some kind of rule that humans turned their emotions on after an amount of time has passed. Maybe it would be like going to the toilet, and our body would notify us, when we had to turn our emotions back on.

I can definitely see the appeal of turning off emotions. They effect our lives in big ways. Have you ever had a bad day and taken it out on somebody else, who then got upset about it? Did you ever have to let someone down and feel sorry about it? Did you ever like someone who didn't like you back? Did you ever get laughed at and feel like you wanted to crawl under a rock and die? Did you ever get so mad you wanted to break something? you probably have. You are human aren't you?

Sometimes the logical answer to a problem is different to the answer we get when we involve our emotions. It might be logical to leave an injured man behind, but you might not because you feel sorry for him. It might be logical to fire someone, but you won't because you know they'll get upset.

Also, many people who exude coolness have that "couldn't care less" thing going on...

Yes, the ability to turn off our emotions would be great, but it doesn't exist. It simply cannot be done and I'm both sad and glad about this. If this ability were real, it should be a luxury, because whilst having emotions can sometimes be annoying, feeling is what makes us human. Even if we were made have emotions and just turned them off occasionally, some of us might get a little addicted to the numbness and abuse this ability. And, never know things like happiness or love. Without emotions some of my favourite cds or books would be extinct, and most of those remaining wouldn't make sense. It's a good thing we weren't given a choice. Or, convinced we had a choice like my friend or the vampires from Vampire Diaries. Deluded much?

^ Thought i'd include this random pic of the "10 things I Hate About You" cast. They look like they are happy :)
So what did you think?

Also. Do you guys have any suggestions for future themes? If so please leave one in the comments box or send an email to balletnutter@hotmail.com with "Make believe ideas" written in the subject box.

About the Blog:

About Me

I have been told by many that I belong to another era, but the truth is that I like a mix of new and old things. Originally this blog was for reviewing books, but it's filled with all kind of things now. I have too many hobbies...